Firefox 26, Netflix’s Suro, Vagrants and Dockers and Websockets for all – Snippets

Firefox 26 digs in: Today we’ll see the release of Firefox 26, latest in the overly regular Firefox release cycle. From the (currently beta) release notes, we can see the big changes. All but the Flash plug-in are now click-to-play by default, Windows users can update their Firefox without having to write into the Firefox folders, the password manager can handle password fields generated by scripts and on Linux, if the installed gstreamer can handle h264, so can Firefox. A couple of fixes, some developer enhancements and thats about it. There’s also a Firefox for Android update due today. The release notes note some performance improvements, the same password manager enhancement and some fixes. The developer page for Firefox 26 covers changes of interest to developers in more detail. Firefox 26 will be turning up in updates and for download later today.

Netfix’s Suro goes open: From the people who brought you a cloud full of monkeys… Netflix’s latest open source release is Suro, an application monitoring system used by the video stream vendor to track the behaviour of their Amazon AWS deployed applications. Originally based on Apache Chukwa and adapted to fit Netflix’s demands, Suro pulls the company’s monitoring data from the various app clusters and pushes it to S3 (for Hadoop based analytics), to Apache Kafka (and on to Storm, Amazon ElasticSearch and Druid and to other event processors. There’s a lot more detail in the announcement including in production stats and how the pipeline is used to analyse errors.

Vagrant meets Docker: The latest update to Vagrant, version 1.4 has been announced and the big improvement in system that has traditionally been used to create automatically reproducible development environment is the addition of Docker support. The Docker provisioner can install Docker and then lets Vagrant cirtual machine pull and configure Docker containers within it. There’s also some enhancements to the scriptability of Vagrant itself, the ability to require a particular version of Vagrant and support for standalone file sync plugins.

websocketd: And finally, have you wanted to make a shell script or other app into a WebSocket server but lacked a library or access to the code to do it? Websocketd might be the answer as it turns anything with console I/O into a WebSocket server in a style rather reminiscent of CGI. Remember, most command line applications are not suitable for being exposed to the raw web, but the app could get you out of a hole when prototyping.

And, for reference, everything mentioned today is open source software.